Comparative Notes on the History of the Social and Solidarity Economy in Latin Europe

This chapter is a comparative discussion of the history of the social and solidarity economy in Latin Europe, with brief visits, where appropriate, to Latin America. The geographical and cultural context of the analysis is the Latin world in which certain convergences seem to emerge, affecting the development of associationism, cooperativism, and mutualism. The scarcity of previous work on this subject means these notes, ranging from 1830 up to the Second World War, must be provisional, hypothetical, and often out on a limb. They attempt to pose some questions and open up some fields of research to encourage future work.